A multi-community would be all communities with a certain name, across all instances. It would prevent powermods from being a problem on Lemmy. i think it should be notated with m/<insert name here>, just like communities but with m instead of c.
The answer to such questions is almost always “Because someone hasn’t done it yet”.
As others have mentioned, this platform has grown drastically over the past month and so the devs are somewhat preoccupied with what they’ve prioritised for the platform as a whole. This feature though is on the radar, as others have said.
A quick fix that I actually think would help be just in the UI, where the user can group the communities they’re subscribed to into what ever groups they like, so that it becomes easier to browse through communities individually by topic.
Lemmy is open source. The developers are working on this for free (minus some sponsorships). PR’s are always welcome to help add new features you want :)
Another feature I’d like to see is instance admins proposing multi-communities, as in: multi-communities which pop up in the search results and allow you to subscribe to all the the communities grouped together with one click/touch. This way the problem of community fragmentation across multiple instances (e.g. multiple instances having a a “memes” community) would be solved (or mitigated at least).
Counter question, what is the use case here?
I have only ever needed this feature with NSFW content. In Lemmy I have easily and better way resolved it by having another account with nsfw instance. This creates even better outcome than the multi community feature. All clients easily support two accounts, and you can switch between them in few presses.
Use case? Just wanting to group together certain topics. Grouping together all the duplicate communities that have the same focus as well.
Use case is obvious.
Making a ton of accounts for each topic is not a good solution.
You don’t have to make a ton of accounts. An account on one instance can subscribe to and participate in communities on any other instances (provided it hasn’t been defederated by the instance admin).
Of course. That’s not what we’re talking about?
I like to keep my work-related communities separate from my hobby-related communities. So Python/R/Data/Academia communities would be grouped under “work”, and Gardening/Bread/Crochet/3D printing would be “hobbies”, and then I might want a news group where I can see politics, local news, US news, world news, tech news, etc.
This would be really helpful to me for reducing distractions when I’m actually trying to get information about what’s going on in the (real) world or in my specific corner of the programming world.
my answer is that the devs have other, more pressing issues to work on but that begs the question: what?
Performance, security, reliability, other quality of life features, better UX, there are 374 issues open on their github: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues
Until recently it was impossible to browse All due to an issue where it would auto-refresh the feed with multiple posts every second. This and similar issues necessitated a big rewrite to move away from websockets.
Then that was fixed, but it was fixed the same week as the Reddit API went down, so making sure everything was stable and stopped setting on fire under the unprecedented load became priority.
All kinds of other things are still going on, for example there are continuing issues with federation not working as expected which is literally the main feature of Lemmy.
Devs have to prioritise, and “nice to have” features might be a way down their list. That is ultimately the answer to the question in your title.
